Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should apologize for allegedly turning a meeting with US President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance into his fiasco.
This was stated in an interview with CNN by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He expressed doubts about Zelensky’s intentions to actually end the war with Russia. “He (Zelensky – ed. past.) I didn’t have to go there and become an opponent,” Rubio said.
The US diplomat also noted that Zelensky may not want a peace deal. “He says he wants to, but maybe he doesn’t want to,” he said.
Rubio also criticized Zelensky’s tone towards Vance during the meeting, when the latter said the path to peace “can go through diplomacy.” Zelensky replied that he had negotiated with Putin in 2019 and signed ceasefire agreements with him in Donbas, but he violated them.
According to Ruby, from that moment on, the meeting “did not go according to plan”. “This active, open undermining of the peace effort has been extremely disappointing to everyone involved in dealing with him, and I believe he must apologize to us for wasting our time on a meeting that ended the way it did,” the secretary of state said.
CNN reporters reminded Rubio that he himself had said that Putin could not be trusted. The secretary of state assured that the U.S. approach in this situation would be based on the principle of “trust but verify” and that Trump would not be involved in the bogus deal. Rubio, citing an unnamed European foreign minister, also said Europe’s plan was to continue the war for another year, after which Russia would be so weakened that it would ask for peace. Rubio believes that this plan is unrealistic.
He said Zelensky could have signed a basic economic agreement with the US on Ukraine’s underground five days ago, but “insisted on visiting Washington”. Blaming Zelensky for the dispute in the White House, Rubio said it was a big mistake to “start teaching us that diplomacy won’t work.”
